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A "Genuine Relationship with the Actual":
New Perspectives on Primary Sources, History and the Internet in the Classroom

by Michael Eamon

Excerpt from The History Teacher, Volume 39, No. 3

THE PEDAGOGIC VALUE of using archival holdings for the teaching of history has long been appreciated. Using primary sources in the teaching of history transcends the rote learning of facts and figures. It encourages critical thinking skills, introducing students to issues of context, selection and bias, to the nature of collective memory and to other like aspects in the construction of history. As Professor Peter Seixas, Canada Research Chair in the Study of Historical Consciousness, has observed, "historians do have something very important to offer students, which is neither the one big story, nor the recall of a common set of facts, but rather a way of using the traces of the past to construct meaningful stories in the present." Many constraints ranging from the fragility and rarity of documents to the physical and intellectual inaccessibility of the record have, however, hindered the use of primary sources in the classroom. Furthermore, when primary sources are used for teaching, there is a tendency—even amongst those with training in history—to consider them solely as illustrations to lesson plans and classroom activities, not to fully explore their greater contextual and historical value.

The popularisation of the Internet has created an audience hungry for authoritative content. Users employing the Internet for research are engaging in an heuristic activity, in wanting to learn-by-exploring the richness of whatever content can be made available with the least amount of visible mediation. However, contrary to a popular historical mantra, the facts do not speak for themselves. The mere digitising of images, without context, or indeed without any interpretation just adds to the background noise of the World Wide Web, especially in an educational setting. The popularity of metacrawlers, such as Google, that search key words from millions of Web pages, as well as the results of other search engines, further exacerbates the situation. Researchers, especially students, enjoy the instant gratification of quick search results for selected key words and phrases. As powerful a technology as Google exhibits, the searching of key words in this manner can separate content from context. Furthermore, Google along with similar search engines cannot penetrate the majority of institutional databases available on the World Wide Web. Inside such databases are millions of artifacts, documents and digital objects linked to their descriptions, yet virtually inaccessible to most Internet researchers.

A balance needs to be—and can be—struck between the user's desire for unassisted research in digital collections and the practical necessity of mediated access to archival holdings that ensure authenticity and security of the record. Not only can the basic sources for historical education be provided through the Internet and Web-based educational products, but now a greater context surrounding those sources, one which encourages further research, can also be made readily accessible. This not only assists trained historians, but can also brings the pedagogical elements of primary sources to students and to the general public traditionally removed from archival research.

Read Michael Eamon's full article, "A 'Genuine Relationship with the Actual': New Perspectives on Primary Sources, History and the Internet in the Classroom"

Note: Original annotations were not included in this excerpt.

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